Many commercial and industrial job-sites require the use and/or cooperation of heavy machines, each of which may be designed to perform a particular specialized task. In order to effectively manage equipment resources of such a job-site, a daily project schedule may be developed by a project manager or job-site foreman and distributed to equipment operators and other job-site personnel. The project schedule may contain task and resource schedules for individual machines or groups of machines, as well as other job-site related information, such as equipment or resource outages, unexpected outage contingency plans, and scheduled job-site shut-downs. As the job-site operations progress throughout the day, human or automated dispatchers may provide status updates, announce changes to equipment and resource schedules, and provide other instructions for managing the real-time operation of the job-site.
Some commercial and industrial job-sites require continuous or periodic interruption of certain job-site resources during the course of completing one or more job-site tasks. For example, in a surface or subsurface mine site, a road or path that is used to haul excavated ore from the mine to a designated sub location may become temporarily obstructed (e.g., by debris, a stalled machine, etc.). Consequently, the haul road (and associated ingress and egress paths and surrounding areas) may be temporarily shut-down by the job-site manager, and future traffic may be re-routed to an alternative path during the shut-down period. The dispatcher may provide instructions notifying the machine operators and other job-site personnel of the shut-down, the location and route of the alternative path, and other related information to maintain operation of the mine site.
Although conventional dispatch systems may be effective for handling large-scale communication of information across the job-site in certain situations, they provide little or no specific information regarding the operation of individual machines or machine operators in response to such information. Further, such conventional dispatch systems, while serving an informative function, provide insufficient mechanisms for enforcing instructions that are broadcast throughout the job-site.
One system for defining specialized instructions for individual machines in certain designated “buffer zones” and providing notifications of operational violations of individual machines in these buffer zones is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,987,379 to Smith (“the '379 patent”). The '379 patent discloses a system for defining a “buffer zone” around a restricted area or hazardous activity at a construction or mine site. The “buffer zone” may be stationary or variable depending upon the nature of the activity, the potential for change of the activity over time, or the potential for change in the region over time. The '379 patent also discloses that the system permits assignment of priority indices and/or hazard indices to activities. Based on the priority and/or hazard indices, the '379 patent notifies entities that are designated to perform higher priority activities that they are authorized to continue operations within an activated buffer zone (while also notifying them of possible constraints on the scope of such authorized activities). The system of the '379 patent also notifies entities that are designated to perform lower priority activities that they are not authorized to continue operations within an activated buffer zone. If the entities that are designated to perform lower priority activities continue to operate in the activated buffer zone, the system of the '379 patent provides a signal to the entity and/or a central control station that a buffer zone violation has occurred, and that the entity should be moved.
Although the '379 patent allows for the creation and modification of “buffer zones” for defining a hierarchy of approved operations in such buffer zones and provides a notification system that informs machine operators and job-site manager(s) of deviations from the operational hierarchy, it does not adequately manage the operations of individual machines or groups of machines in the buffer zones. For example, the recourse disclosed in the '379 patent for dealing with machines that disobey buffer zone instructions and/or restrictions is limited to the provision of “an alarm signal” to the machine operator (or job-site manager) and/or the dispatching of a person of authority to forcibly move the machine out of the buffer zone. However, the '379 patent does not provide for the control of machines operating in and around the designated buffer zone. As a result, the buffer zone creation and monitoring system disclosed the '379 patent is limited in its ability to control individual machines and, therefore, limited in its ability to manage the overall operations of the job-site.
Furthermore, although the '379 patent discloses the establishment of buffer zones for both scheduled and unscheduled activities in certain situations, it may cause inefficiencies within a job-site. For example, the disclosure of the '379 patent does not provide for the modification or temporary postponement of such activities based on real-time (or near real-time) operations of the job-site. More particularly, the system of the '379 patent does not schedule or modify activities that require the establishment of a buffer zone based on current or prospective operations of machines and resources of the job-site. Because the system of the '379 patent does not manage the schedule of non-emergency activities based on actual operating conditions of the job-site, the system may unnecessarily restrict access to a zone during a time of peak activity in the zone. Thus, the system and method described in the '379 patent may unnecessarily limit the efficiency of the job-site.
The presently disclosed systems and methods for machine control in designated areas are directed toward overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above and/or the problems in the art.